Quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

About Kay Redfield Jamison:

Kay Redfield Jamison is an American clinical psychologist and writer. Her work has centered on bipolar disorder, which she has had since her early adulthood. She holds a post of Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is an Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.

Kay Redfield Jamison

I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on

Kay Redfield Jamison

When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is pai...

Kay Redfield Jamison

It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one k...

Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy

Kay Redfield Jamison

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, m...

Kay Redfield Jamison

The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides

Kay Redfield Jamison

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths t...

Kay Redfield Jamison

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is ...

Kay Redfield Jamison

If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?

Kay Redfield Jamison

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she sho...

Kay Redfield Jamison

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable

Kay Redfield Jamison

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these wal...

Kay Redfield Jamison

No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this ...

Kay Redfield Jamison

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.

Kay Redfield Jamison

But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.

Kay Redfield Jamison

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute bel...

Kay Redfield Jamison

Author Bio

  • NameKay Redfield Jamison
  • DescriptionAmerican bipolar disorder researcher
  • BornJune 22, 1946
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPsychiatrist; Essayist; Psychologist; Author
  • AwardsMacArthur Fellows Program